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"I have been using GotMarketing Campaigner for almost 4 years now and I was finally fed up with the shortcomings of their system (there are many). In desperation I signed up 10 days ago to use Constant Contact, even though I have no need for their template support. Then I found Campaign Monitor. Your system is a complete realization of my wish list. So far it has worked beautifully (first campaign went out this morning). I'm looking forward to doing many more campaigns with you. Thanks!"

Craig Miller, Ithaka Partners

We instantly loved this monthly newsletter by UK based Recycle Now. This is definitely one of the nicer looking emails I’ve seen in a while, especially for such a good cause.

On top of looking great, the newsletter features loads of useful content. From tips, interesting recycling trivia, interactive games and even a poll for their subscribers. To top things off, the email even looks great with images disabled.

This one’s going to be tough to beat.

Designer:  Ben Enright  |  See the complete design

A huge apology to our customers who saw a delay in the delivery of their campaign today. The Campaign Monitor data centre suffered a major blow several hours ago when it apparently wore a direct lightning strike.

There was in fact only a very short outage until backup systems kicked in, but this was still enough to delay many campaigns. All systems have since been restored and all campaigns in the queue are now being delivered. You will receive a confirmation email as soon as your emails are delivered.

My sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused, I've been assured this is a freak occurrence (hey, it was a direct lightning strike). A big thanks to everyone who got in touch with us about this, we're getting back to each of you as I type this.

We've published a follow-up post with more recent results - view it here.

We recently had a few customers approach us about print stylesheet support and whether or not they can include them in their campaigns. We weren't sure either, so we did some testing to get to the bottom of it once and for all.

What is a print stylesheet?

Quick background, print stylesheets basically allow you to set a different set of CSS rules when you print the page to the one you see when viewing it on screen. For more details, check out Eric Meyer's great intro. By specifying a print stylesheet for our newsletters, we could ensure when a subscribers prints our email they see a much more print friendly email that might use simpler formatting and even hide some elements of the email itself.

The test

Because most email environments won't let us link to an external CSS file, we used the @media rule to specify our print only styles (more on this here). Here's a quick sample of the code we used:

<STYLE type="text/css">
@media print {
   p.printme { font-size: 10px; color: #f00; }
}
@media screen {
   p.printme { font-size: 40px; color: #000}
}
</STYLE>

The results

Email support for the print stylesheet
Email environment	Print version support
AOL 9 Security Edition
Gmail
Hotmail
Yahoo! Mail
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Microsoft Outlook Express
Lotus Notes
Mac Mail
Microsoft Entourage
Eudora (Mac)
Eudora (PC)

As you can see, the results were quite varied. None of the web-based email environments supported the print-friendly version, but most of the desktop environments did. Ultimately, we can put this down to lack of support for the @media rule. Unfortunately, since none of the web-based environments support the use of the link element for embedding external stylesheets, the @media rule is the only option available.

Conclusion

From our quick tests it appears that including print styles via the @media rule doesn't do any harm in email environments that don't support it (as they are ignored completely). If you're sending an email like an invitation with specific details or any other kind of email your recipients are likely to print, you may want to consider adding a few print specific styles if it will make your email easier to read.

If any of you guys have had other experiences with print stylesheets and have anything to share, I'd love to hear it.